For seven years at Common, I sold real estate owners and developers on two things they had every reason to reject: a brand-new asset class (coliving) and a brand-new operator (Common) to manage it. By the time we sold the company in 2022, we had signed on more than 7,000 units across 50+ buildings with owners ranging from institutional REITs to family office developers.
We got there by losing a lot of pitches before figuring out how to win them.
Selling into real estate is not like selling into any other industry, and vendors who came in with playbooks built at SaaS companies, consumer brands, or industrial sales orgs ran the same plays and watched them fail. A technology vendor would pitch the head of acquisitions when the real check-writer sat in asset management; a service provider would lead with "revenue growth" when the underwriter cared about cap rate compression on exit; an ops platform would build SaaS-style outbound sequences and watch them die in inboxes that real estate executives never open.
We built this workshop to fix those misfires. After teaching this program as a five-week course for the past 18 months, we're now packaging it into a single 3-hour workshop to better fit the schedule of proptech executives and sales/marketing teams.
It's a case-based intensive built around the lessons I wish someone had handed me before my first pitch at Common, plus everything I've absorbed since talking to operators, GPs, asset managers, and vendors across the industry through Thesis Driven. It's opinionated, tactical, and designed for sales leaders, founders, and business development professionals selling into real estate owners, developers, and operators.
A three-hour intensive on making the case and closing the deal with real estate owners and developers.
Identifying your audience: companies.
The taxonomy of real estate firms by structure: institutional owner, REIT, private equity sponsor, family office, syndicator, owner-operator, developer
Asset classes: multifamily, office, industrial, retail, hospitality, and the emerging niches
Investment strategies: core, core-plus, value-add, opportunistic, development
How those variables interact to determine who buys what
Translating the resulting map into a tiered target customer list
Identifying your audience: roles.
The decision maker map across acquisitions, asset management, property management, capital markets, IT, and the C-suite
How each role is compensated and what each one actually optimizes for
Who signs, who blocks, who champions
How the same product gets pitched differently to each
Making the financial case and crafting the message.
A working primer on the real estate finance vocabulary vendors need to speak fluently: cap rates, NOI, IRR, equity multiple, cost of capital, expense ratios, going-in versus stabilized yield
How underwriters and asset managers actually evaluate a new line item
Constructing a financial case that maps to specific positions in a pro forma
Translating that case into positioning that lands
How real estate buyers respond to different framings: cost savings, revenue lift, risk reduction, time savings
Top of the funnel: inbound.
Building a content engine that real estate owners actually read
Managing LinkedIn campaigns that build trust and familiarity over time
Executive posting cadence, content mix, and the role of comments and DMs as a sales channel
Getting placements in podcasts and newsletters
Owned channels: newsletters, research reports, and proprietary data
Event speaking, conference panels, and the in-person circuit that still drives outsized awareness in real estate
SEO and GEO (the LLM equivalent) in a category with limited search volume
Top of the funnel: outbound.
Cold email and LinkedIn outreach strategies to real estate decision makers
The structural choices that get a message past the inbox filter
Account-based marketing strategies
The current role of cold calls and cold in-person site visits
Software and tools to enable outbound campaigns, including data sources
Nurturing and the sales cycle.
The cadence of a real estate sales cycle, which often runs six to twelve months and involves multiple stakeholders
Keeping deals alive through that window: educational content, drip sequences, in-person touches
The specific moments that actually move a deal forward
Conversion.
Where deals stall: pricing, procurement, security review, legal redlines, the new champion who replaces the old one mid-cycle
How to avoid getting stuck at the "pilot" phase
Closing deals with fragmented buying committees and multiple stakeholders
Diagnosing which stage of the funnel is actually broken when revenue plateaus
This is not a "sell me this pen" sales coaching workshop. The real estate industry has its own incentives, its own vocabulary, and its own cadence; the goal is to give sales leaders the tools to hone a message that resonates with the wallet and the calendar.
A tiered target customer list mapped to product fit
A buyer persona for the role they need to win
A financial case constructed around the line items their product actually affects
An inbound plan across LinkedIn, PR, podcasts, owned channels, and events
An outbound campaign mapped to a target list
A nurture sequence calibrated to a real estate deal cycle
A sales-journey map with the choke points named and the fixes prioritized
Who it's for
Sales and marketing leaders at vendors and technology companies
Business development representatives selling into owners, developers, or operators
Founders, CEOs, and GMs running revenue
Brokers, capital advisors, and service providers regularly pitching real estate owners
Format & access
One live session: Three hours
Post-workshop access: All participants will receive an invitation to join our private Circle community after the workshop concludes
Within one week of the workshop ending, participants will receive access to:
Full session recordings
Slides and presentation decks
Circle is where we host all workshop materials and continue the conversation. Members also gain access to a live, active community of real estate investors, developers, operators, and capital allocators to connect, ask questions, and continue the discussion beyond the session.
Frequently asked questions
Will participants receive a copy of the materials? Yes. All registered participants will receive an invitation to join our private Circle community. Recordings and slides will be uploaded within one week of the workshop ending.
I can't make this time. Will a recording be available? Yes. All registered participants receive access to the recordings and materials via Circle, even if they cannot attend live.
The vendors who win in real estate are the ones who learn its language, map its buyers, and build a funnel that respects its cadence. This workshop is built to compress that learning into three hours.
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
